Our work seeks alternative and experimental approaches to architectural practice, inspired by the interdisciplinary context of the Academy and the creative culture of Detroit. In our immersive studio environment, students pursue independent projects alongside peers, mentors, and guests, deeply and critically engaging a range of architectural ideas, approaches, and situations. Ultimately the work aspires to shape the cultural and built environment by continually reshaping our own architectural and urban professions.
Department Philosophy
The Architecture department at Cranbrook fundamentally challenges and repositions space, design, production, and meaning.
Department Philosophy
The Architecture department at Cranbrook fundamentally challenges and repositions space, design, production, and meaning.
PROGRAM
Architecture Program Overview
PROGRAM
Architecture Program Overview


ARCHITECT IN RESIDENCE
ARCHITECT IN RESIDENCE
Gretchen Wilkins
Gretchen Wilkins has been practicing and teaching architecture for nearly twenty years from locations such as Michigan, Australia, and Vietnam. Her practice includes built work, awarded competitions, funded urban research, and publications. Wilkins’s current work explores new models for density, industry, and mobility in rapidly transforming cities. Her Future Factory project in particular proposes new industrial building types for high-rise, high-volume production integrated with the public urban realm. She received her PhD in Architecture from RMIT University, and a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Michigan. Wilkins is the editor of the book Distributed Urbanism: Cities after Google Earth.
Program
Who are we looking for?

Benediktas Burdulis, 2016
Program
Who are we looking for?
The department seeks independent and highly disciplined students who are invested in the pursuit of contemporary architecture and its relationship to our culture and physical world. We expect each applicant to have earned an undergraduate degree in architecture or related design discipline. Understanding the seminal issues in contemporary practice and demonstrating a personal motivation for the intensity and rigor of independent design research is also essential. Cranbrook offers exceptional students the ability to experiment with ideas and methods that are simultaneously personally compelling and produce new models of creative, architectural practice. Each student is encouraged to develop a profound body of work that culminates in a thesis project.

Jane Jordan Gravely, 2012
Legacy
Legacy
Cranbrook is a crucible for ideas
The Architecture department allows the individual student to develop a body of work not bound by a preconceived educational objective but in accord with their experience, passion, and skills. There are no required courses. This academic freedom is an extraordinary intellectual platform for students who possess the individual will and dedication required for establishing their own specific agenda and position in relation to architecture. This open approach to graduate architectural education has produced a legacy of exemplary and experimental architectural practice. The heritage of this place, from Saarinen to Eames to Libeskind to Hoffman, is about making, about engagement, and about experimenting with new solutions through new ways of working. To that end, idiosyncrasy is both welcome and necessarily challenged: challenged by peers; by visiting critics and scholars; by ongoing discourse and by the Architect-In-Residence.
Gretchen Wilkins
The Cranbrook Experience in Architecture
Gretchen Wilkins
The Cranbrook Experience in Architecture

Program
Program
Life in the Studio
In the department, students gather formally and informally to share their work, ideas, and often meals in the department kitchen and lounge. As a group, we also have a variety of scheduled gatherings. Essential to the development of the work are individual desk critiques with the Architect-in-Residence and more formal pin-ups where students present their work to all members of their department and interested peers from other departments. We also have reading assignments and discussion sessions on subjects that are relevant to the work happening in the studio and topics beyond the department.

Lucy McRae
Photo: Brian Kovach (Photography '21)
Visiting Architects
Visiting Architects
Visitors enhance our program and introduce new ideas
Each semester we invite numerous visiting lecturers and architects who offer new points of view, review student work and often spend multiple consecutive days with students to conduct workshops. We invite established and emerging voices in order to connect us with the breadth of architectural production happening in the world.
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Lucy McRae
Sci-Fi Artist and Body Architect
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Nat Chard
Architect, Professor of Experimental Architecture at the Bartlett, University College London
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Hoanh Tran and Archie Pizzini
HTAP Architects, Ho Chi Minh City, VIetnam
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Verity-Jane Keefe
Artist & Lecturer, Central Saint Martins, UK
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Frank Fantauzzi
Architect and Chair of Architectural Design at MICA
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Ying Zhang
Architect and co-founder, Fab9, Melbourne, AU
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Laura Foxman
Architect, We Are All Collage, Detroit
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Alexandra Neyman
Artist/Architect
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Daniel Libeskind
Architect
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Sandy Attia
MoDusArchitects - Italy
Past Speakers
Past Speakers
Facilities

Haruka Ashida, 2016
Facilities
The Architecture department is housed in a 6,000 square foot freestanding building with approximately 4,000 square feet dedicated to large, individual studio spaces enabling large-scale work. The remainder of the building includes a dedicated wood shop, a metal shop with digital plasma cutter, and enclosed computer and printer room, material storage, a large critique/exhibition space, a kitchen and dining room. Students also have access to the Academy’s main wood shop and metal shop facilities which include a CNC router and industrial-size spray booth for finishing large-scale work. Students also have access to equipment in other departments at the Academy, with a wide range of state-of-the-art woodworking, metalworking, ceramics, printmaking, and photography facilities.